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Tuesday, 6 February 2018

What if I want to change the world, but I am the World’s Biggest Daydreamer #PowerDaydream

(picture taken by a writing partner before my diagnosis...)

A few years ago I hit my forties and found out one day that I stop breathing in my sleep.

Every night, while I was asleep, I would stop breathing 15 times every hour.

I'd close my eyes and, without knowing it, I'd also close my lungs.

The doctor giving me the results asked me to guess the longest time I stopped breathing.

He turned it into a game probably to keep me awake.

It was 100 seconds.

I stopped breathing, on a completely regular night of sleep, for 100 seconds.

I couldn't even try that if I were awake.

Though with my concentration that broken the longest I could focus on doing anything, like not breathing, is about 100 seconds.

The way it works is that I’d stop breathing which wakes me up long enough to start breathing again, so I fall back asleep... which stops the breathing long enough to wake me up and start breathing again so then I’d fall asleep...
Over and over.

It’s like Tantric Sleeping.

Your body keeps going without ever actually getting there.

And this was going on for probably 30 years, and I was so tired...
I was so tired...
I was so tired that I had no idea that this was going on.
Every night.

Anyway I got it tested and got it fixed and now I wear this breathing mask every night and it turns out my wife isn’t into Darth Vader.
Which is a shame.
Or second-hand air-conditioning units.

But I’ve got an even bigger problem.

I am now getting some proper sleep.

I had no idea how tired I was, I just knew that I couldn’t make a decision or finish a thought.

That’s how I started off working in comedy.

I would start a sentence right here, and it would finish off... SOMEWHERE OVER THERE.

And then they'd say something like:
“Hahaha - that’s so funny.”
And I'd explain:
“I can't remember what I just said.”
“Hahaha, stop it.”
“No, really.
I need to have a lie down.
Right now.”

The downside was that I would spend entire days... entire decades... daydreaming.

I thought this machine - the one that keeps me breathing through the night - would give me proper brain-restorative deep-cycle REM rest.

And it does.

But I still can’t make a decision, or finish a thought...
...only on a much grander scale.